What the Devil

2 Comments

Apart from being one of the most controversial films of all time, The Devils is also devilishly difficult to locate.  For as influential as it was (you can’t tell me nobody in Monty Python saw this before making Holy Grail) it has largely been buried, at least in the United States.  It doesn’t stream and to get a viewable copy you are limited to a Spanish language import DVD and have to manually select English as the language if you want to hear it as produced.  The question is if you do want to see/hear it.  Written and directed by Ken Russell, it is over-the-top.  Chaotic and cacophonous, it’s almost distracting and somewhat boring for about half its run time.  Then it turns incredibly violent and grotesque.  So why did I watch it?  Well, for one thing, it was something I knew I could’ve included in Holy Horror, had I been able to access it then.  For another thing, I’d read about it many times and was determined to find it.

Based on historical events (but stylized to the point of abstraction), the film is about the Loudun possessions of 1634.  Nuns in an Ursuline convent began displaying the kinds of tics that girls would display in Salem some 58 years later.  A local, unconventional priest, Urbain Grandier, was accused of bewitching them and was burned at the stake.  The film makes much of the political machinations taking place, and revels a little too much in the behavior of the nuns.  It also enjoys portraying medieval torture methods and has an almost Clockwork Orangesque feel to it.  Released in 1971, it was given restrictive ratings where it was permitted to be shown, and although some horror has surpassed the excesses in recent years.

Religion’s relationship to horror is a frequent topic of discussion on this blog.  This movie is a textbook example of that.  After my nerves stopped jangling so much, I recollected that Ken Russell was also responsible for Lair of the White Worm.  Another story of debauched nuns and religion gone awry, it made me wonder what Russell’s personal interaction with religion might have been.  He apparently converted to Catholicism and then converted away again.  It certainly doesn’t get much sympathy in his movies.   Father Grandier is somewhat heroic in The Devils, but the overall institution is clearly corrupt.  In some cases religion is the means of fighting horror.  In other cases it is the cause of the horror.  Here the latter is clearly on display, and even that is, unfortunately, over the top.

See Monsters

Leave a comment

I have a soft spot for seventies movies, but I can’t decide if The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea is horror or not.  I found it on a horror list, and an oblique reference to Lord of the Flies got me interested.  It reminded me, in some ways, of The Wicker Man.  Although based on a Japanese novel, the movie’s set in England.  Two subplots seem unrelated except they happen to the same widowed mother and son.  The son is part of a group of five boys in a private school who have a secret society (echoes of dark academia here).  The leader, although not yet at puberty, is a sociopath who’s very bright and the others follow him.  He declares that a perfect balance (a very East Asian religious outlook) exists that adults simply cannot realize it.  Indeed, adults are bad.

At the same time, the boy’s mother meets and falls in love with a second-mate on a merchant ship.  The boy likes the mate too and feels that they have found a perfect balance.  Thus the two plots come together.  The boys in the club feel that the son has gone soft on their principles, and so to prove he hasn’t they arrange the vivisection of an anesthetized cat.  When the sailor returns, unexpectedly, to try to marry the widow, her son objects.  The perfect balance has been distorted.  The boys decide that the sailor must be treated “like the cat.”  They take him to a distant overlook on a pretense, and drug him.  In a long shot at the end, the boys gather around his unconscious body.  Now, the similarities to The Wicker Man may seem passing, but the idea of human sacrifice is there.

Is this horror or not?  Hard to say.  Most of the movie revolves around the mother’s relationship with the sailor (which the son watches, voyeuristically, through a knothole in his bedroom cupboard.  The secret society is always there, however, and when the plots come together you realize that the sailor will have to be killed.  Like Wicker Man, there’s nothing really explicit here, although Wicker Man does have a horrific ending.  The Sailor only has one by implication.  The leader of the secret society of boys is pretty scary and apart from the widow, parents are pretty scarce in the movie.  I was left wondering what it was that I’d just seen.  I can see why someone would list it as horror, but it had other echoes that I felt might fit better.  It was, however, free for the streaming.

Eye Eye

Leave a comment

When trying to be conscientious about not spending too much money on movies there’s always the risk of seeing something cheap.  In the case of The Eye Creatures, not only was it cheap, but it was also a throw-back to childhood.  I remember seeing this one in my younger years, and, not yet old enough to be critical, loving the costumes.  Rewatching it as an adult, where some critical faculties remain, reveals it to be a bad movie.  Poorly written, poorly acted, and poorly financed, it ticks all the boxes.  It’s actually a remake of an earlier American International Pictures film, and AIP wasn’t known for its lush budgets.  To be fair, the film is supposed to be a sci-fi horror comedy, but the comedy isn’t that good.  The unintentional gaffs are.

So, the Air Force is concerned about keeping flying saucers secret.  When an “unfriendly” one lands where the teens all go parking, the Air Force investigates while the eponymous eye creatures terrorize the local kids.  Specifically, they seem bent on revenge against Stan Keyton and his girl, because they ran over one of the creatures.  Keyton gets arrested for manslaughter because the creatures substitute the body of a drifter they killed for the corpse of their own comrade.  The police don’t believe in aliens, of course, and the Air Force denies everything.  Keyton and gal decide, after discovering the the eye creatures explode when exposed to light, to round up the necking kids and wipe out the aliens with their headlights.  They figure nobody will believe them anyway.

Some movie monsters stick with you for decades.  The eye creatures are one example of this.  Simply seeing the movie title reminded me of them, although the only plot point I could remember was that they exploded in the light.  I didn’t recall all the voyeuristic watching of teens making out that the Air Force officers did.  Or the tedious revisiting of the Old Man Bailey character.  One of schlockmeister Larry Buchanan’s films, it was released the same year as his other cheap childhood favorite, Zontar, Thing from Venus.  As much as people like to make fun of makers of such cheap movies, Buchanan gained recognition in the New York Times (as have other makers of schlock such as Roger Corman and William Castle), so there is something to these movies.  For one thing, those of us who grew up in the sixties remember them.  And, if we also remain cheap, we can see them again as adults, and relive a bit of cinematic history.

Good Hearts

Leave a comment

If you’re looking for more religion-based horror, you might try the 1987 film Angel Heart.  As I’m discovering quite a bit lately, I could’ve used this one in Holy Horror as well.  The religious elements are pretty hard to miss, beginning with the protagonist’s name, Harold Angel.  (Hark the, any one?)  A private detective, Angel is hired to find a missing person for a Louis Cyphre.  His search takes him from New York (where a guy keeps a pistol in a Bible (there’s maybe an entire book in this trope), down to New Orleans.  First he meets Cyphre in the back room of a black church but soon he starts getting chased out when he starts to uncover any clues.  Time to head to the Big Easy.

In New Orleans he finds all kinds of occult practices taking place.  And the folks are none-too-friendly when he starts making mention of the guy he’s after.  He ends up witnessing a voodoo ritual and complains about the bad religion he encounters.  The big reveal indicates that there’s been a case of mistaken identity.  Louis Cyphre (Lucifer) has actually been setting an elaborate trap all along.  The portrayal of the Devil as a sophisticated gentleman isn’t new, of course.  There is a scene where Angel and the Devil are in a church and Angel, being a detective, uses inappropriate language.  Lucifer (not yet revealed as such) has to remind him a couple of times to watch his tongue while in a sacred place.  Satan is more pious than Angel.

The movie has multiple issues, but it has become a cult film over the years.  Like many others that I’ve discussed on this blog, the entire plot draws its horror from religion.  Angel has a difficult time with the non-Christian worship he witnesses.  But really, it is the Christian Devil that’s the antagonist here.  Quite often in movies like this, fear of other religions is based on the supposition that Christianity is correct.  That’s been a broad American trait for centuries, and it gives horror room to run.  The idea of a generic Christianity (which is probably what most Christians hold to) overlooks the doctrinal differences, often quite significant, between denominations.  This particular avenue isn’t much pursued in horror films, at least in my experience.  Interestingly, like Cat People (1982), it places this religion-based horror in New Orleans.  There’s plenty to explore in that connection as well.  Angel Heart is not a great movie, but it can lead in some interesting directions; a holy sequel may be necessary.

Remembering Winter

Leave a comment

There’s a deep satisfaction at attaining a goal, no matter how low the bar.  Having rediscovered the “Beast Collection” after looking to see if Snowbeast was on it—it was missing from another DVD collection I have—I determined to watch my way through.  It took two or three months, maybe four, but I finally finished it out with Snowbeast itself.  One of a spate of Bigfoot films from the seventies, this was a made-for-television movie.  Many retrospectives show a movie going up in critical estimation over the years, but this one seems to have sunk down into the “bad movie” category.  But still, of the seven (!) Sasquatch films in the pack, it is clearly the best.  A low bar, as I say, but still, it has the advantage of being relatively well written.  Joseph Stefano, who wrote the screenplay, was one of the minds responsible for The Outer Limits.  He also had credit for writing the screenplay for Psycho. 

Decent writing can help redeem bad movies.  But more than that, you can actually care for the characters.  In some bad movies you have a difficult time raising any feeling for the people portrayed—that’s true for more than one of the other films in this collection.  Here are people that doubt themselves, but have good hearts.  The story isn’t complex (one of the reason modern critics scorn it).  A ski resort in Colorado—much of the movie shows people either skiing or snowmobiling—a young woman is killed by the eponymous snowbeast.  When the owner of the lodge insists on keeping it open for a festival, the current manager (her grandson) is reluctant to kill something that’s so human.  There’s a bit of a moral quandary here, which provides some traction on a slippery slope.

The beast then kills a member of the search and rescue team, and they know they have to destroy it.  The principal characters track it down, and after the beast gets the sheriff, they shoot it.  As I say, not much of a plot, but the characters have some depth.  It’s not a great movie by any stretch, but it doesn’t leave you feeling as if you’d have more enjoyed doing your taxes.  And that’s saying something for a collection of movies that cost less than most single DVDs.  Now if that makes me sound old, keep in mind that this movie was from the seventies.  And even if most re-appraisers think it has grown worse over time, I’m willing to disagree.  After all, I just accomplished something by watching it.

Step Far

Leave a comment

It made a bit of a splash when it came out, Longlegs did.  It took a while to get to a streaming service I can access, but I can say that it’s a movie with considerable thought behind it.  And religion through and through it.  I would’ve been able to have used it in Holy Horror, and it is one of the very few movies where a character corrects another, saying “Revelations” is singular, not plural.  Somebody did their homework.  Although the plot revolves around Satanism, you won’t be spoon-fed anything.  The connection’s not entirely clear, but it does seem to involve some form of possession.  The plot involves ESP and a literal deal with the Devil.  Things start off with a future FBI agent encountering Longlegs just before her ninth birthday.

As an adult, she’s forgotten the childhood encounter but a set of murders with a similar MO indicates that a serial killer, called Longlegs, is on the loose.  The murders are all inside jobs, and it turns out that a doll with some kind of possessing ability is responsible for inspiring fathers to murder their families.  No details of the connection between the dolls, Satan, and the reason for the killings ever emerges.  The movie unnerves by its consistent mood of threat and menace.  Satan, the guy “downstairs,” appears more properly to be chaos rather than a kind of literal Devil.  Satanic symbols are used and there are plenty of triple sixes throughout.  The Bible has a role in breaking the killer’s code, but talk of prayer and protection also find their way in the dialogue.  Longlegs uses a ruse of a church to get the dolls into his victims’ houses.

I’ll need to see it again to try to piece more of the story together, but Longlegs is another example of religion-based horror tout court.  Serial killers are scary enough on their own, but when their motivation is religious they become even more so.  Nicholas Cage plays Longlegs in a convincingly disturbing way, but there’s definitely some diegetic supernatural goings on here.  The art-house trappings make the plot a little difficult to follow, particularly early on.  Religion, however, shines through clearly.  The FBI agent, although psychic, has ceased believing in religion while trusting the supernatural.  Even as the credits rolled I had the feeling that I’d missed some important clues.  And those clues would be important, particularly if I ever do decide to write a follow-up to Holy Horror.

Father of Yeti

Leave a comment

“Always steals women.”  So Subra mutters high in the Himalayas.  Perhaps one of the most unintentionally funny bad movies, The Snow Creature does hold a place in history.  It was the first abominable snowman, or yeti, movie made.  It’s also incredibly cheaply made with a costume that most twelve-year-olds could’ve fabricated better.  As the antepenultimate movie in the “Beast Collection,” I felt obligated to watch it one snowy weekend.  Spouting colonialist and sexist values like a Republican, the story is tedious even at eighty minutes.  But funny at times also.  So a botanist travels to the Himalayas to study plants at 10,000 feet.  His fun is interrupted when a yeti kidnaps the head sherpa’s wife, causing the sherpa to take charge and start to hunt the beast.

The American scientist decides to capture the yeti instead so that he’ll have something to give the foundation sponsoring the expedition.  Leaving behind a female and baby yeti, both killed, he drugs the snowman until a special refrigerated container can be built—gee whiz, Americans can do anything!—to bring the beast back.  And they fly west from Bombay to California, where, when they land the beast is held up in customs (I kid you not).  There’s a debate about whether he’s human or animal and while the debate goes on, the creature escapes.  The hapless police can’t find a seven-foot tall yeti wandering around Los Angeles at night, harassing the women.  Finally they figure he’s using the storm sewers.  They trap him but, alas, have to shoot him.  At this point they completely lose interest in the corpse and exchange meaningless banter as they drive off.

This movie seems to be what the Trump administration wants America to revert to.  Bossing around BIPOC people in their own countries, women being helpless without men to rescue them, and corporations buying what is arguably a human being.  Sounds like a playbook to me.  Also, it was extremely cheap.  What amazed me is that United Artists distributed it.  People must’ve been pretty hungry for entertainment back in 1954.  Having said that, it is worth watching for a laugh.  Now that streaming exists, you can find this free on various services.  If you like very wooden acting, and superior Americans having their way in Asia just because they’re, well, Americans, you might find this a passable way to spend a snowy weekend (wait til winter to watch it; it’ll keep).  Only a word of advice: be sure to lock up your women before you do, because the beast always steals women.

Watching Watching

Leave a comment

Dynasties exist in many professions.  Some of us grow up where there’s no succession, but for those who do the results can be good or bad.  I’m thinking in the case of Ishana Night Shyamalan it will be good.  I have not seen all of her father’s (M. Night Shyamalan) movies, but I have seen enough to know that he has considerable talent but also sometimes misses the mark.  That’s how I felt after watching The Watchers.  I didn’t know anything about it (including the director or producer) before watching it, but it only took a few minutes before I began thinking that it was like an M. Night Shyamalan movie.  Like his work, it is intelligent and intriguing.  And, in this case, slightly off the mark.  The story is a little too involved, and it may remind you, at points, of The Village (one of my “old movies” that I still go back to now and again).

Mina, an American living in Ireland (never explained), gets trapped in a forest from which no one ever escapes.  Now, this part was scary if you’ve ever been lost in the woods.  (I have been and it still terrifies me.)  These woods are inhabited by watchers—in lore known as fairies, among other things.  A professor had built an observation deck where he could observe them.  The only way a human can survive in the woods is to stay inside the shelter at night.  Mina’s car breaks down in the woods and she comes across three survivors.  They’ve been in the shelter for months and since it is in the middle of the woods, there’s no way to get out before sunset, when the watchers will kill you.  Now, were the premise of the film to have stopped there, it might well have been believable.  The story gets deeper (but I won’t give it away), straining credibility a bit.  There’s a little too much stuffed in.

Does it work as a gentle horror movie, in the Night Shyamalan vein?  Yes.  It satisfies an itch on a rainy or snowy weekend.  Too many unanswered questions remain.  The setting in Ireland makes sense, given the fey plot, but why is Mina American?  Why is her sister Lucy also in Ireland (or is that just a visit at the end)?  Why didn’t [redacted: spoiler] watch the video long ago and leave?  Other questions also haunt.  Why did the professor shoot twice?  And more.  Still, having a source of Night Shyamalan movies for more than one generation seems like a good thing to me.  And I really want to know where, exactly that forest is located in real life, with or without the fairies.

Pseudo-documentary

Leave a comment

Documentaries have an honored place in visual education.  Of course, there are some who want to spice them up a bit with dramatic re-enactments.  These are sometimes called docudramas.  Then there are those who fake the documentary style to make mockumentaries, generally as a species of comedy.  Sasquatch: The Legend of Bigfoot is none of these.  A pseudo-documentary, it comes with “The Beast” collection I’ve mentioned before a time or two (mainly to excuse my bizarre viewing).  It presents itself as a documentary, but pretty much everything about it is fake.  The only real people are Roger Patterson—the movie shows his famous Bigfoot film—and perhaps the miners at Ape Canyon.  Oh, and Teddy Roosevelt.  In any case, the movie follows seven men as they make their way into remote British Columbia where “the computer” tells them sasquatch likely live.

The pseudoscience is easily enough spotted early on, but the movie never lets up its purported intent to bring low-budget proof back from the wilderness.  I’m not sure how the actual wildlife footage was captured.  In this slow-paced horror film there is quite a bit of actual nature thrown in.  I also wondered how they managed to get a cougar to attack a horse train and a bear not to maul one of the incompetent actors.  These two scenes aren’t special effects, and it strikes me as being either foolhardy or that trained animals were used.  It doesn’t seem to have had the budget for the latter, but a real mountain lion does land on one of the horses before quickly making an escape.  Although shot at night, the bear attack doesn’t seem entirely fake.  These things kept me wondering.

After about two months of horseback riding the crew makes it to the computer-predicted sasquatch homeland.  Bigfoot attacks the camp at night—no question that this one is fake—and after all these weeks of riding they decide to leave the next day.  Getting there is, apparently, most of the fun.  Fun, however, isn’t a word I’d use to describe this movie.  The hokey caricature characters (the old-timer, the dopey cook, the injun, the scientist—who does nothing but measure a thing or two) are worth a pseudo-laugh or two but the story struggles to keep the viewer awake on a cold weekend afternoon.  I kept wondering, in the Pennsylvania chill, how the weather in northern Canada was better in late September than it was around here in April.  I had to remind myself that Bigfoot was big in the seventies.  Big enough to handle both documentaries and fiction, and movies that are the latter, pretending to be the former.

For the Camera

Leave a comment

Smile 2 is getting some good critical notice and I hadn’t seen Smile (1) yet.  Psychological horror often bothers me, but I figured I’d grin and bear it.  I’m glad I did.  The ideas in the film, which participates in “the stigma trope,” are disturbing because it’s unclear if Rose (the protagonist) is mentally ill or not.  The stigma trope posits that something has infected someone either by having seen something they shouldn’t (as in Ringu) or by physical contagion (It Follows) and the victim can’t shake it.  Smile may trigger viewers with suicidal phobias since the premise is that an entity feeding on trauma passes from person to person by having the new victim witness the previous victim’s suicide.  Rose is a therapist who hasn’t gotten over the trauma of her mother’s death.  Rose witnesses a patient die by suicide, and who smiles just before she does it.

The patient told Rose that she’d watched one of her professors die by suicide.  Rose subsequently learns that the professor also witnessed a suicide and so on and so on.  Each prior victim had watched someone else die.  Now Rose has to figure out how to break the cycle, otherwise she’ll perpetuate it.  The idea of inadvertently obtaining a “sticky” entity is pretty scary, and a very human concern.  One of the more frightening aspects of possession movies is the belief that now that demons know that you know, they will target you.  Interestingly, what makes this film provocative is that the victim has to have suffered trauma before.  As such, it is a study of trauma and its lasting effects.  I suspect most people don’t intentionally traumatize others (world leaders excepted).  Trauma can be dealt with (or not) in very different ways.

Smile did quite well at the box office.  I suspect there are a lot of us traumatized people around.  Capitalism encourages traumatizing others through slow violence, if not the more obvious quick way.  People don’t easily walk away from events that scarred them, particularly if they happened at an early age.  Such people, if experience is anything to go by, find themselves in vulnerable positions in life and rather thoughtless people, often for religious reasons, end up traumatizing them even further.  I have to admit that there were triggers for me in Smile.  I still struggle with a few of my own traumas that were never resolved.  Like Rose, I sometimes don’t know who can really be trusted with such things.  This is a perceptive movie.  I guess now I can put on a happy face and see Smile 2.  But first I’d better talk to my therapist.

Capture and Release

Leave a comment

Waste not, want not.  I place some stock in old sayings.  With the way things are going, prices are sure to rise and so saving a penny or two may be wise.  So I turned back to my boxed set of “The Beast” for my horror fix.  As I’ve explained before, I bought this DVD set before streaming was a thing, and I was feeling nostalgic for Zontar: the Thing from Venus.  Being a fan of bad movies, it was worth every cent.  The set is actually (mostly) themed around Bigfoot.  I’ve talked about a few of these movies before, and trying to be frugal, I’ve determined to watch the whole set, no matter the cost.  Besides, there’s an aesthetic to bad movies.  The Capture of Bigfoot, no doubt, is a bad movie.  Knowing this before I slipped the disc in, I have no business acting outraged at the poor acting, directing, writing, or any cinematic sins.  Except one: a horror movie can’t be boring.  And Capture is b-o-r-i-n-g.  If you like movies about people slogging through knee-deep snow, this may be for  you.  

What really amazes me is the talent the compilers of such collections have at locating truly obscure bad films.  Now, I have a soft spot for 1970s horror.  Nostalgia carried me through, floating on those seventies’ vibes.  The clothing, especially.  And more particularly, the winter coats.  Although set and filmed in Wisconsin, the winter coats the kids wear in this movie are just like those everybody was wearing in Pennsylvania at the time.  And yes, I trudged through knee-deep snow my fair share of times.  That part just opened the flood gates of memory.  So, the story goes like this…

An evil businessman (I lost track of how many people he killed, or tried to), wants to capture Bigfoot (shown early, in winter white) to put the town on the map.  Paying stooges to go get the beast, he finally builds an elaborate trap that succeeds.  The local game warden, with his girlfriend/wife and her little brother, decide the creature isn’t evil.  Using Batman-style tying skills, bad guy’s henchmen assure that most of his enemies escape to trudge through the snow some more.  A mysterious Indian character tells the game warden that the creature must be set free, which it is.  The evil businessman dies in a fire inside his wicked mine where he’s keeping the beast.  In the end, two families—the warden and the Bigfoot—pay mutual respect.  I do wonder about the mentality of someone making a movie like this.  But then, some forty years later, here I am writing about it.  Win-win. 

Drac Retold

Leave a comment

House of Darkness is one of those horror movies that doesn’t seem like horror until a good way in.  I knew nothing about it, other than it had to do with vampires, when I watched it.  A guy named Hap, a bit drunk, is trying to score with a woman, Mina, who he’d just met in a bar.  They don’t know each other’s names yet but she lives in a castle far from town.  Just as things begin to get intimate, another woman, Lucy walks in.  At this point Bram Stoker comes to mind.  The two main female characters in the novel are Mina Harker and Lucy Westenra, so naming the sisters (for so the two are) after them lets you know you’re in vampire land.  As Mina is off fixing a drink, Lucy takes Hap on a tour.  He begins to suggest a threesome, but the women want to tell ghost stories instead.

In the guise of fiction, Lucy narrates their past as sisters who rescued an abused girl and who moved from town to town to wipe out the men.  Hap is then startled by a third sister, Nora.  He is now growing quite annoyed by their game and when he tries to leave, they attack him.  Now, I was watching this on a Sunday afternoon after having been up late the night before.  My motive in watching movies at such times is to help keep awake (as well as to have something to blog about).  The pacing of House of Darkness was so slow that it struggled to meet my expectations in that regard.  Still, it isn’t a bad movie.  It has a feminist message, and as I read about it later I learned that it was intended to be a modern retelling of Jonathan Harker and the three women in Dracula’s castle.

Then I learned the film was written and directed by Neil LaBute.  That name is seared forever in my mind as the man who tried to remake The Wicker Man.  Suddenly things began to fall into place.  Many stories—some would argue all—are retellings of classic tales.  LaBute seems to enjoy trying to make them into something slightly different.  His directorial vision, however, doesn’t seem cutting edge.  House of Darkness is mostly banter, some of it clever, between Hap and the women he wants to seduce.  I kept thinking, “It’s a work night for him,” and wondering how he’d manage to function the next day.  Of course, I was probably projecting since I knew that, if I made it through this soporific afternoon, I would be at my desk bright and early the next day. 

From the Grave

Leave a comment

“Macabre” is a word of uncertain etymological origin.  One of the most convincing arguments that I’ve read is that it derives from Hebrew qbr, a root associated with graves.  The “m” prefix would be the preposition “from,” making the phrase miqqeber, or “from the grave.”  It has been decades so I don’t remember where I read that, but it made sense to me.  In any case, this is a fairly common word for titles, it would seem.  I recalled Stephen King noting Macabre among the scariest films up to 1980, so I thought I’d try to find it.  A simple IMDb search showed it streaming for free on a couple of platforms, so I clicked on one of them.  At about halfway through, I paused the movie to see if maybe I’d got the wrong one (I had).  But I decided to finish it out in any case.  There will be spoilers below.

What I’d found was the 1980 Lamberto Bava movie.  Bava’s name was familiar to me from his famous father, Mario Bava, an Italian horror movie innovator.  There was a family resemblance.  So, what’s it about?  A woman with two children is having an affair.  Her somewhat unstable daughter decides to drown her brother to get her mother to come home.  On the way, her paramour, who is driving, runs into a guardrail and is decapitated.  After being released from the mental hospital, the woman moves into the apartment where the affair had been taking place.  The house is owned by a blind man who knew about the affair.  It sounds like, however, the affair is still continuing although said man is dead.  

When the daughter, who is trying to get her parents back together, confesses that she drowned her brother, the woman drowns her—echoes of Medea here—but the blind man kills the woman when he tries to save the daughter.  What makes this even more macabre, is that both the blind man and the daughter had learned that the woman was keeping the head of her lover in the freezer—echoes of Alice Cooper as well—to stimulate her as she continues the affair without her former lover.  It’s not a horror classic.  Titles can’t be copyrighted, so some repetition is bound to occur.  The Macabre I should’ve watched was the one from either 1958 or 1969.  Apparently this is a popular film title, as there was another released in 2009.  I can rule out the last one, but to find out what I should be looking out for, I’ll need to dig out my copy of, well, Danse Macabre.

Unusual Autopsy

Leave a comment

I avoided The Autopsy of Jane Doe for some time because, well, autopsy movies just aren’t my thing.  Besides, I thought it might be a “true crime” sort of movie and those aren’t my favs either.  That didn’t stop the recommendations, so I gave in.  I’m glad I did.  It’s a cut above a lot of what’s out there, and although it does rely on a few more jump-scares than I like, it isn’t all about them.  And it turns out that it’s Holy Sequel material.  Here’s how the story goes: a father and son mortician team, who have the morgue in their basement, specialize in determining cause of death for the local sheriff.  When four bodies are found in one house and none of it makes sense, the sheriff brings the most suspicious body, Jane Doe, to the morticians for their assessment.  Externally the body has no marks, so what killed her?

The majority of the movie is the attempt to solve this mystery.  The father and son find impossible things—evidence that the woman had been tortured, but there were markings on internal organs without any damage to the skin.  They soon determine this is bad juju and when lights begin shattering and corpses get up and walk around they know they were right.  They’re trapped, however, in their basement.  It’s clear that this Jane Doe isn’t quite through with them.  I’ll try not to spoil the ending here, but I did mention that the Bible comes into it.  How so?  Well, it turns out that one of the impossible things in the body is a charm that has Leviticus 20.27 written on it (the passage about not allowing witches to live).  And although it invokes Salem, it does so in a way that suggests the witch hunters were to blame.

This movie was actually out before Holy Horror was finished, but as I point out in that book, there is no website or repository listing horror films that use the Bible.  To write a book like that, you have to do a lot of watching.  I love watching movies, but it takes both time and money, items in constant short supply in my life.  When I do watch, I try to make connections.  It would also be interesting to write a book on how Salem is portrayed in horror movies.  What with the work-a-day world in which I live, I’m not sure how many more books I can crank out.  Especially when they don’t sell.  The important thing is not to let the title of a movie put you off, for autopsies can reveal much.

Horror Adjacent

Leave a comment

We have the basic facts, but still, it takes a good bit of imagination.  We simply don’t know what the life of Mary Shelley was like, as experienced by the woman herself.  The movie Mary Shelley isn’t a horror film but it’s horror adjacent.  How could a movie about the woman who invented Frankenstein be anything but?  The handling of Haifaa al-Mansour’s film is generally as a drama, or a romance.  The story takes the angle that it was her stormy relationship with both Percy Shelley and her own father that led Mary to express her feelings of abandonment in her novel.  And while we have to acknowledge the liberties all movie-makers take, it does seem interested in keeping fairly near the known details of Mary Shelley’s life.  Although other women were also writing then, it was still a “man’s world” she tried to break into.

I confess that one of my reasons for wanting to see this film was that Ken Russell’s Gothic had a powerful impact on my younger mind.  That movie, which is over-the-top, being the first I’d seen telling the tale, had become canonical in my mind.  I know the dangers of literalism, and I wanted to see someone else’s take on the story.  Al-Mansour’s treatment takes a female perspective to the narrative.  It seems that Percy Shelley and Lord Byron were both advocates of what might now be termed a playboy lifestyle, and that Mary, daughter of forward thinking Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, was fairly liberal herself.  Although Percy Shelley, like Lord Byron, was quite famous in his time, that didn’t always equate to financial solvency.  I could relate to parts of that quite well—full of creative ideas and shy on cash flow.

Mary Shelley didn’t rock the critics, but many felt it was a thoughtful treatment.  It is dark and gothic, but with no real monsters.  It did explain a bit of inside baseball about Ken Russell’s film.  Both movies make use of Henry Fuseli’s painting The Nightmare to explore the famous meeting of Byron and the Shelleys that led to the writing of Frankenstein.  Indeed, Gothic makes a good deal of it.  Mary Shelley explains that Mary’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, had an affair with Fuseli.  I was unaware of that connection.  Something was clearly circulating among the Romantics, many of whom knew each other and, in their own ways, became formative of culture centuries down the road.  And although many critics weren’t impressed, I think it’s about time that a woman’s point of view was brought to Mary Shelley’s life in a world not kind to women.  Even if a woman gave the world one of the most influential books of the nineteenth century.